


A Small Price To Pay

by Hideous_Sun_Demon



Series: our atoms straining to align (was the universe in rehearsal for us) [3]
Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Angst, F/M, Gen, I know that Allison/Luther is whack but I’m working with what canon dealt us, M/M, Mutilation I suppose, Reginald Hargreeves’ A+ Parenting, Scars, Soulmate AU, Soulmate Names
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-16
Updated: 2020-07-16
Packaged: 2021-03-05 06:21:49
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,927
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25309663
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hideous_Sun_Demon/pseuds/Hideous_Sun_Demon
Summary: On the twelfth hour of the first day of October, 1989, forty-three women around the world gave birth to children, all with the names of their soulmates written on their wrists. Then Sir Reginald Hargreeves got seven of them, and he took matters into his own hands.
Relationships: Allison Hargreeves/Luther Hargreeves, Allison Hargreeves/Patrick (The Umbrella Academy), Dave/Klaus Hargreeves, Diego Hargreeves/Eudora Patch, Number Five/Dolores (The Umbrella Academy), Vanya Hargreeves/Leonard Peabody
Series: our atoms straining to align (was the universe in rehearsal for us) [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1757833
Comments: 9
Kudos: 107





	A Small Price To Pay

**Author's Note:**

> Umbrella Academy soulmate AU where everyone is born with their soulmate’s name tattooed on their wrist.
> 
> References to child abuse, but this is The Umbrella Academy, y’all know what you’re getting into here.

The umbrella tattoo was not the first wildly inappropriate procedure to be performed on the young bodies in Reginald Hargreeves’ care. Truthfully, the notion of ~~branding~~ marking his charges with conforming insignias only came to him later (Number Two and Number Five, as usual, had been getting it into their heads that his orders were not mandatory; growing pains, no doubt, but ones that needed to be nipped in the bud for all of them). But the first procedure’s necessity had been clear and incontestable from the beginning.

The distraction of soulmate names was not conducive to the grander aim of saving the world. Thus, precautionary measures were taken.

A simple procedure, really. A small strip of the epidermis removed from each of the seven wrists, just enough to erase the names printed on each infant, though the names were recorded for posterity, of course, and all possibilities investigated thoroughly; though nothing of note came from that. It left only a faint scar behind on each child. A small price to pay for the preservation of the earth.

The children, even before they understood the true gravity of what had been done to them, had a keen sense of some definite absence. They didn’t socialise or even get the opportunity to socialise with people outside the academy as a general rule, but it still struck them, the way that they would block and grab and snap the wrists of the criminals they were sent into battle against and see, even on them, names written in the same place as the fine, empty, identical scars on each of their own arms. They noticed it too, in the looks of vague disapproval Pogo would give to their empty skin. They were taught, eventually. It was Pogo’s job to educate them in biology, and soulmate biology was a part of that.

It was a simplified explanation, when they were younger: _the name on your wrist is that of the person who you will love most in the world_. Five year old Diego hadn’t needed a name to tell him that. He’d grabbed a Sharpie and painstakingly traced out on his wrist, kindergarten scrawl, MOM.

“You don’t need anybody else to complete you,” Grace had told him when he’d proudly come to show her his handiwork. “You’re perfect all on your own.” And she’d shown him her own bare, imitation-skin arm. But she still kissed him on the forehead and took the proffered marker to obligingly print NUMBER TWO on her own wrist—he was still a Number at this point; they all were. Years later, she might have re-written that as DIEGO, but by then, Diego had scrubbed his wrist clean. He wore his bare wrist as he did all his other scars, with the anger of what had been taken and could not be given back, what had been given which was never wanted.

Allison and Klaus grew into equally giggly teenagers, and they used to spend their evenings sitting on Allison’s bed, cross-legged and knees pressed together as they wrote and re-wrote names on their wrists with the glitter pens Grace had bought her for her tenth birthday. Well, Allison re-wrote: celebrity name after celebrity name, anyone that she’d heard on the radio or seen on TV, anyone that was an alien to this sterile world of hers. Klaus just wrote FREDDIE MERCURY on one wrist and ANNIE LENOX on the other and declared himself finished.

Ben would join them occasionally, and Vanya even less so. Ben wrote the names of his favourite X-Men characters (Magneto and Cyclops). Vanya never quite knew what to write. She didn’t know what she was supposed to like, or want to like, let alone love most in the world. She couldn’t quite imagine anyone loving her most in the whole wide world. She just copied whoever Allison wrote down until her sister snapped at her for it— _you can’t have him, he’s mine, god Vanya!_. She stopped being invited so much after that, but for once she didn’t mind. There was something she liked about that neat pink crease on her wrist, a mirror to when she held it up against Klaus’, or Allison’s, or Ben’s. It was an absence, but this one was one to be shared.

Allison wrote Luther’s name just once, shaping each letter painstakingly, alone in her room under the covers, and then she’d fallen asleep gazing at it. She forgot to wash it off in the morning before breakfast. Klaus cackled, and Diego sneered, and Dad ordered her back upstairs to clean herself up with a glare. But Luther had smiled. She’d seen it; the tiniest, warmest curve of the lips.

Luther had smiled, but he didn’t write ALLISON on his wrist. His father’s words were clear: soulmates were a frivolous distraction best done away with. And his father was always right.

Five—well, Five never cared much at all for the idea of soulmates. That was the thing about him; Luther may have walked and talked in Reginald’s shadow, but Five was always more like their father than anyone ever gave him credit for. No distractions, only perfection. He didn’t join Allison and Klaus in their nightly rituals. The idea of tying yourself to one person forever was hard to stomach for a boy who leapt through time and space, and besides, by the time it became a regular occurrence Five was long, long gone.

In the future though, with the dust of all things settling around him, Five talked to Dolores through that long, waking nightmare and thought he finally understood. He didn’t scrawl DOLORES on his wrist: it would be too childish, even if he had a pen to do it with. He understood though, and Dolores did too. That was the thing about them, in that world: they had no need for words.

Allison and Klaus ~~and Vanya~~ stopped their little game after Ben died. A lot stopped after Ben died. Klaus melted away into the city streets, and then Diego disappeared as well, cutting away in the middle of the night and washing up in the police academy, sharpening his wits and his smile and flashing them both at the pretty new recruit named Eudora Patch, who threw one of the best left hooks he’d ever seen and had a tiny cluster of letters on her wrist spelling out DIEGO. He told himself that wasn’t why he fell for her, and he was relieved when he realised he believed it. Eudora was smart, and beautiful, and she had a laugh like a blade whistling through the air. She rolled her eyes at him and remembered how he took his coffee and didn’t ask about his scars and she was kind, she was kind, she was kind.

“Diego is a very common name, asshole,” she said as she saw him eye her wrist with a feline smirk.

“Then I guess you better learn to choose wisely.”

(And she did, in the end.)

During their last fight, the one that ended it all, Eudora had grabbed his wrist. They’d both frozen, gazes locked on where her fingers rested over racing pulse-point, over a thin pale line of skin.

“The fuck do you want from me, Patch?” he snarled. “I don’t have a soulmate, remember.” She never asked his scar, and he wondered if she knew how wrong that was, or how right. “I don’t need anyone else,” he said. He hadn’t even considered that Eudora hadn’t been thinking at all of soulmates, that she’d just wanted to stop him from walking out the door. Diego didn’t believe in kindness, back then. He just saw another person looking at his scar, at all the things he wanted to give that were taken from him.

Allison had tucked her glitter pens away in a drawer long ago, but she’d never quite grown out of make-believe. She had trysts with men straight out of magazines, show-stopping, smile for the camera! It was about bigger, it was about grander, it was about getting free. She hadn’t expected freedom to come in the shape of Patrick.

They met in a coffee shop, and Allison promptly missed four appointments just to keep talking to him. By date number three, she was willing to miss one hundred more. She remembered his eyes, brown like sunlight on honey, the way they’d brightened when—“hey, you’re Allison Hargreeves, right?”—her gaze had finally dared to creep down to his wrist, spied the curl of an A, and L, an L, and I—

She remembered the way they shuttered, just slightly, when they realised what her own wrist held, or didn’t hold. _Polite smile, half-step back, it’s been really nice getting to know you—_

She thought about probabilities—it was possible, wasn’t it, that his name had once been hers? She thought about those eyes. She thought about glitter pens spilled across a duvet, a thirteen year old girl’s longing. She thought about freedom.

It’s hard to grow out of make-believe when you can make anything you believe true. Allison smiled. When she grasped Patrick’s hand, she held it tight. “I heard a rumour…”

Far, far away, up on the moon, Luther sat and thought. It was a vital mission, Dad had said so, but when all was said and done there wasn’t much else to do up there. Luther thought about his brothers, sometimes, but mostly he thought about Allison. He wondered about the things she was doing, and what she was thinking about, and whether she was thinking about him too. Sometimes, as he stood and watched the glory of the sunrise, he used a finger ( _too big, too hairy, not his, wrong, wrong, wrong—_ ) and traced clumsy letters on his spacesuit, over his wrist. A...L...L…

It made things a little less lonely up there.

Klaus didn’t think about his soulmate the same way he didn’t think about most things. All of that was back there, back in the real world, back with all the things he was trying to leave behind. One night, so high the sky was at his waist and he was nearly able to wave at Luther up there on the moon, Klaus got the chemical name for ecstasy tattooed over that long-faded scar, a decision which he did not remember the next morning but one which he delighted in regardless. Methylenedioxymethamphetamine. It got him a lot of laughs from the right sorts of people.

When he tumbled headfirst into 1968, he didn’t have much time to think about his soulmate at all, What with all the bullets being fired at him. That was, until he met Dave.

Dave was...Dave was...Klaus struggled to come up with words that were acceptable substitutes for the real thing, rather than cheap imitations. Klaus couldn’t even put a name on what he felt for him until the day Dave saw his tattoo.

“This foreign?” he asked, mouth soft with irony. Klaus stared at the black ink. There was a hot, buzzing feeling in his ears. It took him a long minute to realise that it was shame. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d felt that.

“This—it’s not—“

Dave only shook his head gently—how could someone so strong be so gentle?—and pulled off the chunky leather wristband Klaus had never seen him without. Some people liked to hide their names; it wasn’t anything unusual, especially not in the military. That’s what Klaus expected. He hadn’t been ready for the sinewy scribble of a scar, pink like a bruised lip and raised at the edges. Nowhere near as neat and surgical as his. It looked, actually, like a burn.

“Courtesy of my old man,” Dave said, and Klaus had to stop himself from laughing—it wasn’t funny, but it almost was, in a way. Dave and Klaus, across time and space, two peas in the same fucked up pod. “Guess he didn’t like what he saw. Son of a bitch—but, still, s’pose they’d have never sent me out here if he hadn’t done what he did.”

This time, Klaus did laugh. “Lucky you.”

“Lucky me,” Dave said, and he kissed him, and in that moment Klaus felt overtaken by—yes, yes, this was love.

They lay in foxholes together, pressing each others’ scars against their lips. Dave would whisper his name against Klaus’ skin, and Klaus would do the same, and this was what completeness felt like. This was what home felt like.

And then a bullet struck Dave in the back, and Klaus screamed and screamed and dropped back into 2018 with nothing of the man he loved but the weight of his body still aching in his arms. Little Number Five had got it all wrong—this was how the world ends; not with a bang, but with a whimper, and the grit of blood under his fingernails. Klaus would press his lips to his scar, his stupid fucking tattoo, and whisper Dave’s name until it was a meaningless jumble of sound, but somehow it never felt the same.

Vanya, in her quiet moments (quietest moments, really; Vanya’s moments had never been loud), wondered if she had a soulmate at all. Logically, she knew that she must have: she had her scar, same as all her other siblings, but sometimes she wondered if that was just some sick joke on the part of her father or the universe itself, a cosmetic scar to make her grieve the loss of something she never had in the first place. Then she remembered that her father never would have missed an opportunity to further differentiate her from the rest of the family if he could help it. That familiar pain of old resentments, if nothing else, was reassuring.

Besides, what could she do? Sometimes Vanya would call her soulmate the quiet contentedness in her belly when she looked around at this apartment that she rented herself, the tiny tutoring business that she’d built on her own, the stack of bills with her—her!—name on them. Other times she called it the savage vindication, sharp like pins and needles tingling through a numb body, that she felt the first time she saw her book in the front window of a bookstore. Most often she liked to think of her soulmate as music itself—though she knew she was being too bold there; she could never hope to belong to something so vast and beautiful.

Then she met her 4 o’clock appointment, dimples and bashful smile, Leonard, and she thought _alright universe, I choose this one._

Leonard, who encouraged her, who believed in her, who looked at her like she was something all of her own—now this was what all those books about soulmates had been talking about. Sitting together in a coffee shop, he shyly pushed up his sleeve to show her his name—“Don’t know about you, but I haven)t met many Vanya’s around here”—she wondered if she was meant to be special after all.

It was Allison who pointed it out, the way the skin around his name was a slight shade pinker than the rest, and the freshness of the ink in his name. Vanya listened, and she felt uneasy, but more than anything she remembered being thirteen years old and being kicked out of her sister’s room because she was ‘stealing’ Allison’s soulmates.

She wanted something of her own this time. She confronted Leonard.

He ducked his head when she asked him, and didn’t he pull off that earnestness so well? “Oh, that,” he tugged his sleeve down to his palm. “I was hoping I’d never have to tell you, so embarrassing, but ah—hazard of the job, I guess. Truth is I’m a pretty clumsy woodworker. Sliced my arm up pretty bad. Doctors managed to fix me up but my name….” He bit his lip. “I had to get it re-tattooed. There was no way I was gonna go a second longer without your name on me, Vanya.”

Vanya believed him. It wasn’t even a conscious decision—in a way, it felt like she had no choice. Everything outside of Leonard was hazy now. Only his words felt crystal clear.

It was only later, as she stood over his crumpled body, that Vanya dispassionately studied the creases of his scar and realised just how stupid she’d been. There was no way that came from a saw blade accident. Actually, it looked an awful lot like her own scar. Harold Jenkins had done his homework after all. Adding VANYA had been a carpenter’s masterful final addition to the piece.

When Vanya picked up that fateful red book, stolen from her father’s office, and flipped through the pages, the last thing she’d truly expected to find was her soulmate. On one of the first pages there was a list of seven names, ones totally unfamiliar to her. Vanya stared, absorbing, considering. In so many ways, this was what all her siblings had been chasing their entire lives.

With a methodical care, she tore out the page and fed it carefully into the stovetop flame until it was nothing more than crumbling ash. All of her siblings, with all their powers, and she was still the only one left who held all the answers. Now that was a feeling she was happy to call her one and only.

Then she picked up her violin case and walked out the door. She didn’t want to be late, after all. She was expected.


End file.
